Twerpette (named for my dachshund Molley, the original twerpette or "goofy girl") seeks to tweak the long nose of life with humor, affection, and gravitas. Topics include dating and relationships, faith and spirituality, language and writing, journalism, technology, arts, academe, whimsy and humanity. Cheeky and tweaky, Twerpette is rated PG13 for mature language and themes. This weblog began May 10, 2005. Copyright 2005-2016 Steve Deyo.

Monday, June 25, 2007

Technology: Browser brilliance

I've still got it -- geek chic (tech smarts)! I solved two tech posers in the last 24 hours -- for my youngest son and for myself.

My youngest's Web browser (Microsoft Internet Explorer on an eMac) was spinning endlessly. I determined that his wireless connection and Safari Web browser were working but five Mac OS security updates going back to 2006 needed to be installed. These ran then optimized and requested a restart, after which everything ran smoothly -- even Internet Explorer would load without spinning (until you responded in the only way allowed to a security query). So I ran a series of forced quits and rapid navigations until I could get to the Microsoft support site (which will only accept IE) and learned that they stopped supporting IE on the Mac in 2005. (On reflection, it was the msn.com calls for DLL and ASP files that seemed to be precisely the problem with IE.) So I downloaded Mozilla Firefox and now everything works as slick as tiger snot on a glass door knob. My guy has Wikipedia for his home page and he is happy.

Meanwhile I have wanted to use Firefox tabbed browsing on my work laptop but "Firefox is not supported." Does this mean it is blocked or that IT just won't say how to enable Firefox? So today I decided to check the network settings under IE and match the settings under Firefox. Voila! Sixty seconds and Firefox now comes up as slick as you please. Of course Firefox will work on my home network -- and it will remember the occasional news-site password better than IE, which positively seems to suffer from amnesia.